The Wall
by Tyanilth
Summary: DARKFIC - warnings for mature themes and violence not graphic . Companion fic to Broken, and it is suggested that you read Broken first. If any of the themes are likely to offend you, please stop reading now. Thank you


_Author's note - this is a companion fic to Broken, and it is recommended that you read Broken first to understand what is going on, though it is not essential. DARKFIC - warnings for adult themes, violence and implied dub-con sex (not graphic). If any of the above is likely to offend you, please stop reading now. Thank you. As with Broken, this is not strictly part of the Hourglass canon although nothing in it is directly contradicted by that story, it is up to the reader whether or not they wish to conside the two pieces to be canon with each other._

_Many thanks to my beta readers, Josie Lange, Shakespira and Gene Dark. Without their encouragement, this is another piece that would not have seen the light of day._

_**"Crazy,**_

_**Over the rainbow, I am crazy,**_

_**Bars in the window.**_

_**There must have been a door there in the wall**_

_**When I came in"**_

_**Pink Floyd - The Trial - from the album The Wall**_

Bad dreams are nothing new to Loghain Mac Tir. The nightmares that inhabit the Fade have been his adversaries since he was very young, on a battleground known and fought over many times. If anything, he prefers them to the good dreams, because the good dreams are traitors. In them it is possible to believe that one's world is still whole, that the dead live again, that the lie called a happy ending is there for the grasping. And then one wakes, and the realisation is like a knife in the ribs, over and over again.

But even for Loghain this dream is unusual. Most of his nightmares are to do with Orlesians. The worst of the recurring ones is set on a farmhold that he will never again see with his waking eyes, and even the sight of the house in the dreaming mind twists a blade in his guts, though he may be slow, painfully slow to realise he is dreaming. Even now the realisation may not come at any point in the dream itself. It may not come until he wakes in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets and shouting loudly enough that it has been known for the sentry on duty to tap on his door to see if the Teyrn is in some sort of trouble. When Celia was still alive it was easier. She had an endless tolerance for his disturbed nights, her gentle touch could sometimes soothe him out of a nightmare and into dreamless sleep without waking him. The scent of woodruff and sweetbriar that always came from her linens because of the herbs she stored them in was in itself an antidote to the worst of the night terrors. But Celia has been dead these past few years, and Loghain fights his night battles alone.

A dream however that starts in a prison cell is something new, and Loghain finds himself curious. He has to assume that this is a prison cell. The room, if it can be called such, is perfectly circular and the walls seem to go up for ever, far too high to see a roof. The diameter of the circle is about ten feet and there are no furnishings, only the rough bricks that glisten with condensation. More worrying is the fact that there is no door. If there is no door, how did he get in here in the first place?

"You didn't put in a door. Year by year, you built this room yourself, brick by brick. I watched you do it. So if there is no door, you apparently did not want or need one."

He whirls. That voice came from over his shoulder, but nobody is behind him. There is noone else in the room.

"Show yourself, demon!" His shout echoes off the damp walls.

The laughter that echoes back has a familiarity to it. "You still think I am a demon? Dear, dear. Your memory is pitifully short."

"This is the Fade." Loghain is now speaking out loud but in a calmer voice. "I may not remember much else, but this is the Fade, and this is a dream. My body sleeps in Gwaren, the night sentry paces the corridor outside my room. So what else can you be but a demon? This is not real."

"Ever the slow learner." And suddenly a patch of the brickwork is gone. No, it isn't gone. With eyes closed, the sense of touch reveals the bricks still there, hard, cold, damp. But when the eyes open again, one curve of the wall seems to have vanished, and instead Loghain finds himself looking into a familiar room, that is his office at Gwaren. A woman in the uniform of Maric's Shield has walked into the room and given a salute to...no, hold on, that's him in the room? That isn't possible.

"Anything here is possible." That is the tormenting voice again behind the shoulder. "This is the Fade. Possible and impossible have no meanings here."

"Then that is a demon in my form." This at least gives him something to grasp at. "But who is the woman?"

"Don't you know?" The voice seems amused. "Do you not recognise her?"

He strains to see - although the room appears to be adjacent to his prison cell, he can't make out her face. She has apparently just told him - the demon who looks like him - her name. He cannot hear her speak from here.

"And that isn't a demon either. Don't take comfort from that thought."

He laughs, and the sound is hollow even to his own ears. "So that isn't a demon in my form, and you aren't a demon with my voice. So what are you supposed to be then?" His eyes don't leave the two figures, whatever they are speaking of, the woman seems uncertain? Frightened? No, neither of those words are right.

"Think of me as a demon if you like. It isn't true, but then you've never found it hard to lie to yourself, have you?"

That drives him into a fury, he spins, frantically searching for his tormentor. But the room is empty, he is alone in here, and no matter which way he turns, the vision of the two figures are directly in front of him, the solid brick to left and right, and the voice behind his right shoulder. There is no way to look away, no way to block the ears. "How dare you?"

"How dare I call you a liar? Easily. There are other words I could use. Coward. Traitor. I thought I would start with the gentlest of the accusations and work my way up."

He draws a deep breath, closes his eyes, tries to will himself to calmness. Shutting his eyes at least blocks the vision of himself for a moment, though it is little comfort. And there is almost a fear - what is happening there when I am not looking? His frozen blue eyes slowly open again, the woman is stripping her clothes off and this he really does not want to see. "So why do you call me a liar?"

"I prefer to start with the other end. I will tell you why I call you a traitor. Because you are betraying the woman you see in front of you, and every woman you are training."

"How so?" The fury is back in his voice.

"As if you did not know." The voice is light, mocking. "Tell me, traitor, what you call the first weeks of training in Maric's Shield."

"Breaking" He makes the word almost without inflection. "We call it breaking"

"Why is breaking necessary?"

He takes a deep breath. This room even has the smell of a prison cell, dampness, mildew, an odour of human waste and the sourness of human despair at the edge of the senses. "None of the Maric's Shield recruits are raw recruits. All of them have come from other armies, other guard units, so the primary breaking of individuality at the recruit stage has already happened for all of them. What we are left with the deeper secondary reason, that they are men and women who are potentially going to be thrown into impossible situations, to do impossible things, at the risk of their own capture or death, because something has to be done. And the importance of what they are going to be expected to do has to come first, ahead of care for their own life, ahead of any fear of pain, torture, violation. If they are not capable of setting themself aside sufficiently to think that way, they might be a good soldier still with a different sort of unit, but not with this one. This is an attempt to find out just what they can tolerate, and ease them out fast if they can't take it." His words have familiarity to him, this is an explanation he has given before to his sergeants, his captains, indeed to Maric himself once. "The ones who survive it, when the process is over they go into battle knowing there is nothing - literally - that can be thrown at them that they cannot deal with somehow, because worse has happened already."

"How many women are in Maric's Shield?"

He pauses. "Not many. In the armies throughout the country, women soldiers number perhaps one in ten in total. In this unit, one in thirty. One of my sergeants is a woman, and she was the first woman to survive the training."

"And you treat the woman recruits exactly the same as the men." For some reason that isn't a question, it is a statement. The voice seems to be waiting for him to agree to the statement or to challenge it.

He opens his mouth to agree, and somehow the words stick in his craw, he cannot force them out, and the voice is mocking in his ears. "Look at what you are doing to that woman."

He's seen it already. He just doesn't want to see. He hasn't ever used a cane even on a male recruit, but the devil with his face who is in front of him is beating that woman with a cane, he can see the bloodied stripes on her tanned skin, the agony that knots her shoulderblades as she clings to his desk. "That. Is. Not. Me." Each word is grunted out as if the physical agony that he is a witness to is being beaten into his own back, rather than that of the helpless victim in front of him.

"She is not helpless." The voice is softer now. "That is not your mother, powerless at the mercy of a human monster. She was given the choice - to leave or to remain. You gave her that choice, here and in the real world. She chose to stay."

"Who is she?" That is a cry of pure grief from his throat, echoing off the damp walls.

"She is a woman you failed." The voice hisses poison in his ear. "As you have failed every woman who came before her, and who came after. Even you are not enough of a liar to be able to say to me you treat the women the same as the men."

Ringing in his ears are the words that he has told the sergeants every time a group with a woman recruit comes in. "Run her ragged in these first weeks. Put the pressure on her physically, mentally, drive her to exhaustion. If she can't keep up with the men, better we know now than later." He had always considered that rational - the training only got harder later on. Now, with all the comforting illusions stripped away he saw that for what it was. That what he was saying to the sergeants, stripped of the rational arguments was "Run her out or break her early. Don't let her get to the stage where the one who breaks her has to be me. Because I don't know if I can do it." Did the sergeants see through him, in the way he was seeing through himself now?

"No, they don't." That voice that both was and was not his seemed amused. "They believe you to be right, they consider your words to be sense. Only you and I know those words for what they are. Cowardice. But that woman there has more courage in her fingertips than you have in your whole body."

She's crying now, that faceless woman soldier, bent across his desk, back, arms, legs a mass of bloodied stripes. He can see her shoulders shake with sobbing, she's pleading with the demon.

"Where does your system fail?"

That is an easier question, because it is an abstract one. "The system fails with with the ones whose pride won't let them admit what they can't take - and that is a weakness in itself. They would die or be maimed rather than admit to failure. That is no use to us, they are a form of rational berserker, if such a thing can exist, and they can't work with a unit."

"How do you break them?"

"We put them into a situation where they have either got to admit to weakness and failure, or suffer permanent injury. Sometimes by mind games, sometimes by physical pain. They have to be faced with an unbearable choice, to beg for mercy or to be destroyed. If they can't then bring themself to beg, we release them from the training."

"And how does this differ with a woman?"

"We have never yet had a woman recruit who got to that stage, they either break before they get there, or they leave."

"Lies again. Lies on top of lies. You know of whom I speak."

Yes. He knows.

"You knew what had to be done to break her. So why did you not do it?"

He takes a deep breath. "Because in every other way she was an outstanding soldier. When you have something in your hands that is that good, you have this fear that once broken it can't be remade and perhaps you start rationalising whether it's actually necessary in this one case."

"And yet you have already told me, convincingly, that breaking is necessary, and you have told me why. So you won't get your hands dirty, you'd let your sergeants do whatever's necessary to break them, but if the sergeants fail then what will you do? Watch the women you failed be destroyed because of your failure? Either this is necessary or it isn't, if it isn't it's a mockery of everything you've done, and if it is, you are betraying the women by not treating them the same as you would anyone else because of your own demons. Coward. Coward and traitor."

He is hammering his fists bloody on the bricks, screaming a denial of this, but his voice cannot drown out that other voice. And then finally he is weeping, his hands pressed against the unyielding wall, grieving for his own blindness and for what he can see happening in front of him, for what that monster there is about to do.

"You are broken, Loghain Mac Tir. As broken as any soldier you trained. You were broken a long time ago, but unlike those you train you were never rebuilt. Instead you built the walls, to block out what you could not bear, and you trapped yourself within them, that self who is still fourteen years old and screaming at what is in front of him that he cannot prevent. You built your own prison and you bricked yourself up inside it."

"I don't know what to do." His voice is raw.

"Tear down the walls." The answer is uncompromising

"I don't think I can."

"Perhaps one person alone cannot. But you are not alone."

His hands trace the brickwork. "Is that her? Is that who I think it is?"

"Yes, and no. That is her, yes, but that is also every other woman you will fail and betray after her if you cannot get past this. She had the intelligence to know you had failed her, and within the Fade was able to set up the situation that would permit her to break and be rebuilt. She has been far harder on herself than you ever could have been, but that is her courage - you are right that she is an outstanding soldier. She deserves better than you have given her."

"That demon..." his voice shakes. "He is raping her."

"He is not a demon." The voice is firm. "And he is not raping her, because she has consented."

"What can I do?" That is a howl of pure agony.

"You already know."

And with that the voice has gone, the vision has gone. He is alone, and there is nothing but the tower of damp brick, the sound of dripping water, and the smell and taste of bloodied failure.

He draws a deep breath. Then with fists clenched and a scream that is not his own, he has hurled himself with all the strength of his anger and pain at the wall, as if the wall was not even there.

And suddenly, somehow, the wall indeed is not there. He is in his office, bent over the desk, the brutalised, crying woman beneath him, her scent in his nostrils mixed with the metallic taint of blood. The voice is silent, he knows he will not hear it again. The demon from the vision is gone, and he knows in his heart that it never was a demon. All the parts of Loghain Mac Tir are together again, damaged and scarred maybe, but whole. And now he has another rebuilding to do.

This is his domain now, he controls it with a thought. That thought places a mirror onto the wall where no mirror was before. He steps away from her, the commands he gives her are comforting in their matter of fact nature, simple orders that can be easily followed. His heart breaks with every painful movement she makes, and it breaks again with pride at how she draws herself together, becomes again the soldier that she was born to be. He replaces her helm himself and tells her something, some version of what he says to a broken recruit in real life. It isn't enough, it can never be enough, but she seems to understand. She steps away and salutes him, he returns her salute. As she smartly wheels away and marches out the door, there is a promise on his lips.

_Never again. That I swear to you, Cauthrien. No other woman will have to put herself through this because I was too much of a coward to do what needed to be done. Never again._

And with that the dream is fading, and he cannot hold onto it. He blinks and discovers that the light on his face is that of a Gwaren spring morning, and the tapping noise is a servant at the door with his shaving water. His armour is laid out on the stand - of course he's taking the sergeants for weaponsdrill this morning.

_What if she knows? Remembers?_

Then she will never ask. This much he does know. And he will never tell her. But he is now her creation, as much as she is his. He always will be.


End file.
